The orb-weaver is the aerial trapper among living creatures, stretching its sticky, elastic web across the aerial runway of its prey and waiting with a patience which would drive a fisherman insane. To insects of its own size, the orb-weaver is a hideous, bloodthirsty monster. It sinks its fangs into its struggling prey, injects a poison quite as deadly as that of the rattlesnake, and quickly sucks the blood of its victim. [Illustration] ORB-WEAVER FILLED WITH A THOUSAND EGGS WHICH SHE LAYS ALL AT ONCE (_Epeira domiciliorum_, Hentz) Atlas with the world on his back, as imagined by the boys of Athens, could not have been more strange than this creature with her distended yellow body. Some of her kin have fasting powers almost beyond belief; they have been kept alive in captivity for eighteen months without food. This species is one of the commonest orb-weavers on the American continent, and its webs, like great cartwheels, are to be found across the pathways in the woods and everywhere in clearings in the wood-lot. She is a tight-rope performer her whole life long and her long, muscular legs seem well fitted to enable her to hang, week after week, from her web, supporting in her much enlarged body a thousand or so eggs, which she will later lay, not one at a time, but all at once. No surprise is sudden enough to catch her unprepared and make her fall from the dizzy heights where she lives, without first being able to attach an anchor line. This she does by rubbing her spinnerets over the surface on which she stands, and by quickly spreading and bringing them together again she makes an attachment disc from which she can reel out her rope and check her fall. The gift of spinning from internal reservoirs, supplied by active secreting cells, is common in the insect world as well as in the world of spiders, for thousands of species of caterpillars make cocoons of silk which they spin as rapidly as any spider makes its web. I doubt if any silk-gowned lady ever stops to think how many thousand gorgeous moths have been cut short in their careers in order that the threads which the silkworms have thrown around them to make a nest in which to pupate could be reeled off to make the silken stuff she wears. [Illustration] A SPIDER FROM A FLY'S POINT OF VIEW (_Dolomedes tenebrosus_, Hentz) A spider from the fly's point of view is a terrible monster, indeed. Its claws of polished chitin, sharp as sword points, each with an aperture leading to a sac filled with deadly poison, its array of eyes of different sizes, its mottled, hairy skin covered with hollow sensitive bristles, and its powerful, leg-like palpi must strike terror to the heart of any fly or cockroach which may happen in its neighborhood.